This text, now a freestanding extrageneric fragment, appears to have been
excerpted from a longer composition: three stray marks along the scissored bottom
edge of the manuscript are evidence that text is missing from the end of the
fragment as well as from its beginning. The author of the cuts has not been
identified; they may be the work of a censor or of Dickinson herself. Millicent
Todd Bingham associated the manuscript with Dickinson's correspondence with Judge
Otis P. Lord; no complete fair-copy of the letter to Lord, however, has survived,
and Dickinson's final intentions toward the fragment remain unknown.